


The More Things Change

by Jain



Category: The Magnus Archives (Podcast)
Genre: Character Study, Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-10-24
Updated: 2020-10-24
Packaged: 2021-03-08 23:35:48
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 915
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/27174625
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Jain/pseuds/Jain
Summary: Gerry didn't immediately realize that anything was different.
Comments: 2
Kudos: 8
Collections: Trick or Treat Exchange 2020





	The More Things Change

**Author's Note:**

  * For [lunavagant](https://archiveofourown.org/users/lunavagant/gifts).



Gerry didn't immediately realize that anything was different. He woke in pain, his body feeling horribly, obscenely wrong in some indefinable way. But that was cancer for you: it hurt and it felt indefinably wrong. He wasn't used to it--it wasn't the sort of thing you got used to--but he recognized it, he _knew_ it.

Or he did until he opened his eyes (tried to open his eyes?) and nothing happened.

"Hello?" he called, but there was no sound, no movement of his lips and throat. Just silence and darkness and pain.

He thought vaguely that he ought to be more scared, but the situation felt too distant for fear. He couldn't feel his heart pounding or his breath coming short--because he couldn't feel his pulse or his breath, full stop--and apparently mind followed matter. His adrenal glands weren't engaging with whatever strange hell he'd found himself in.

Though on second thought, it was probably just a coma. That wouldn't be so bad.

He didn't have any delusions that he might be brought out of a coma to live a long, happy life. The doctors had been gently but decisively clear about that. But if he were in a coma, then there was an endpoint to all this. Eventually his body would shut down--or Gertrude would slip him a morphine overdose--and this painful and boring interlude would be over.

He just had to wait.

* * *

He couldn't hear anything, though he'd read that coma patients often could. He wasn't able to remember how common that was, so didn't know whether his experience was par for the course or whether he was one of the unlucky few.

On the other hand, he doubted that Gertrude was spending hours at his bedside holding his hand and talking to him. Ministering angel wasn't exactly a role that suited her. If he _could_ hear anything right now, it would likely just be the interminable beeps and hums and wheezes of the machines arrayed around him. Maybe it was for the best that he was surrounded by silence instead.

The pain didn't ebb and flow as it had before, when some days he'd felt almost normal and other days he'd been in agony. Instead, it remained an awful insidious wrongness. It never hurt so badly that it whited out his thoughts, and it never lessened either. He suffered its effects as an unchanging and timeless constant.

* * *

"--ended," a voice Gerry didn't recognize said, and Gerry could see, suddenly and without any of the usual wincing and sensitivity that one would expect after being in pitch darkness for a small eternity and then abruptly having the lights turned on.

There were two people standing in front of him: a rather gray-looking older man and a tall woman with short hair, who held an all too familiar book in her hands. The pair of them were oddly blank to his eyes. Even someone unallied with the Entities ought to be at least tinged by the End after using this particular book. But from these two, he got nothing.

"That's me, is it?" Gerry not-quite-asked, nodding at the open page.

"Not exactly an innocent victim then, are you?" the woman said. "If you know about this book."

There was more than a hint of satisfaction in her tone, as though she were pleased that he was guilty of something, and Gerry felt a creeping tendril of caution. He still couldn't get a proper read on either of them, but the available evidence suggested that they were aligned with the Hunt. He wasn't certain they could hurt him under the circumstances, but neither was he certain that they couldn't.

"Innocent enough," he said. "I know what that book is, but I never used it myself, and I certainly never intended to be added to it. I thought I was going to die. I...was ready to die."

"According to this book, you _did_ die," the man said. "Yet here you are. With a lot more interesting things to say than anyone else in these pages."

Gerry hadn't talked to any of the people in the book, after discovering that his father wasn't one of them. He wished now he had. If he'd known what it meant to be bound to it, he'd have been a bit more proactive about dealing with it than simply handing it over to Gertrude.

"Maybe you could say a few more interesting things," the woman said with a meaningful look. "There's a monster in this town that communicates without words, but it's not a vampire. It absolutely adores the sunlight. Any ideas on what it is and how we might kill it?"

Gerry shrugged inwardly. Not as if he had anything better to do, and he had a certain sympathy for the hunters' goal even if their fervor was disconcerting. "Possibly. What are its habits, its appearance?"

The hunters--he was 99% certain that's what they were by this point--started reeling off their observations. Gerry nodded along. He wished he could ask about Gertrude, but he didn't want to place her on the hunters' radar if she wasn't there already. She must've been the one who preserved him in the book and then somehow lost it before ever speaking to him. Well, maybe she'd catch up to the hunters herself and retrieve her book, and then he'd get all the answers he wanted. For now, he supposed he had a job to do.


End file.
